bomberqueen17:

I was talking to @walburgablack this morning on Instagram of all places (we are all desperate not to lose one another, and some of us jaded veterans long ago started exchanging our other handles, because we have never believed any one site would stay), and while both of us are the sort of inveterate essayists who have no real problem fitting in to a largely text-and-OP-based platform like Dreamwidth, we were mourning a little about what we’ll lose by leaving Tumblr. 

She pointed out that it’s not that you can’t lurk on DW; it’s dead easy to just read and not post. But she admitted, it’s a big barrier to actually follow someone instead of reading silently on their page, and an even bigger barrier to actually leave a comment– you have to be coherent, you know?– and like her, I admitted I was using the current kerfuffle as a good reason to actually follow people I’ve definitely read for a while but never actually engaged with in any way. (I am absolutely feeling weird about the social-order inversion of following handles to other sites when they are relative to me very BNF and I’ve never actually spoken to them before but here I am with them suddenly following me back when we were never mutuals on Tumblr? It’s weird. I feel like I’m presuming.)

I was on Livejournal for about a decade before it imploded (I never left, I just also never accepted the latest TOS that wasn’t translated into English, so my crossposter broke and it kicks me back an error a day)– and in that time, I know I had a substantial following of anons who never commented, never reached out to me, never contacted me, but once in a great while someone would leave an anon comment or, later, on another platform, would confess that they’d been reading me for years. Now, I was not a big f-locker on LJ, so there was a ton of stuff I wrote publicly about. (Towards the end, I started having some hostile RL anons– I never did find out who, but someone who knew me was reading my blog and copy-pasting it for non-readers. Even f-locked posts sometimes, so I had to lock down a lot of things. This is preserved in my privacy groups on DW, even though I don’t really remember the details otherwise– some of those groups are explicitly me trying to exclude the person whose account i thought was being used to read locked posts and copy-paste them to stir shit. I never did figure it out, and anyway– LJ imploded, and the RL drama changed, and nobody cared anymore, but. This involved MySpace too, for the record, so there’s some ancient shit for you.)

And what I’ll miss about Tumblr is that it lowered the bar for engagement. I have a lot of followers on Tumblr, more than I ever had on LJ. And an awful lot of you don’t write a great deal on your own. You like posts, and you reblog stuff, and sometimes you leave replies, which usually make my day. But a lot of you have moved into being people I recognize, people I care about, people whose rare actual commentary is a thing I treasure. And that built up because I can form a mental relationship with an avatar and a series of “likes” and reblogs; I can tell what you’re interested in of my content, if it’s that you came for the fic and stayed for the cute farm pictures, or vice versa. It’s all very pleasant. Even if it’s just that you’re only into the fic and don’t care about the rest– that’s cool too! I appreciate that, and it’s part of my experience here.

And you-all are the ones I’m worried for, now. On DW, what will you do? Is there room for you? Of course I think so, I can’t help but write thousand-word essays every time I sneeze. I’m a content creator and it’s what I do and I couldn’t stop if I tried, and I have been chafing in dissatisfaction (i.e. I’ve fucking hated it) for six years on this site because it’s not really designed for me, and I’m fucking delighted to be hopefully finding enough people on a better text-based platform for it to meet my social media needs. 

But, as someone said over there, it’s kind of like everyone’s coming home from war. Like… home, what a profound relief, but… we’ve lost so many and it’s been hard and some of us are pretty fucking damaged, and it’s never going to be the same.

And the casualties are going to be the people who don’t fit on text-based platforms. All of you darlings who don’t have a lot to say on your own, but love things, and curate their reblogs, and signal boost what they believe in, and like what they like and comment only rarely and with great trepidation but often with fantastic insight– 

Oh, I’m just so worried for all of you. I don’t know if Pillowfort will work for you better; I’m going to look over there, worried as I am about their weird UI blind spots and their shaky underpinnings and good-natured (?) ignorance about real-world problems and why can’t i see who liked my posts why have likes– if I can get the site to load, it spun a little wheel for me for two hours last night, I haven’t logged in since mid-November– and I’ll be on Twitter and Instagram and all of that shit. 

But I’m just worried. I don’t want to lose you. I didn’t really mind my LJ anons? but I couldn’t have much of a relationship with them, because I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t know who they were. And they were scary sometimes. Some of them were definitely hostile. I kept having to turn anon commenting on and off. I’ll try to turn it back on, on DW.  It lets you use OpenID if you’re not willing to log in, which is a super 2005 kind of dealie, but it makes sense, I promise. I literally don’t remember how it works but it’s a thing.

(There are still hostile anons on Tumblr too! Just, the barrier for engagement is slightly higher for them, there’s no “dislike” button, and silently hatereading is as invisible as it was on LJ.)

I don’t want to go back to that. I want there to be room for everybody. I’m hoping DW brings back more nuanced discussions, sure, and Tumblr’s a hellsite I can’t wait to escape, sure. But. 

I’ll miss you. I hope you find a home. And I hope that home still includes me somehow.

[me: dreamwidth | instagram | pillowfort | twitter | ao3]

All of this and to also say that lurkers are absolutely welcome on dw. A single post on your dw that you read but don’t post (just so folks know it’s not an empty journal later).